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by Willa Cather (Author)
One of Ours is a novel by Willa Cather that won the 1923 Pulitzer Prize for the Novel. It tells the story of the life of Claude Wheeler, a Nebraska native around the turn of the 20th century. The son of a successful farmer and an intensely pious mother, he is guaranteed a comfortable livelihood. Nevertheless, Wheeler views himself as a victim of his father's success and his own inexplicable malaise.Cather's cousin Grosvenor (G.P. Cather) was born and raised on the farm that adjoined her own family's, and she combined parts of her own personality with Grosvenor's in the character of Claude. Cather explained in a letter to Dorothy Canfield Fisher: We were very much alike, and very different. He could never escape from the misery of being himself, except in action, and whatever he put his hand to turned out either ugly or ridiculous.... I was staying on his father's farm when the war broke out. We spent the first week hauling wheat to town. On those long rides on the wheat, we talked for the first time in years, and I saw some of the things that were really in the back of his mind.... I had no more thought of writing a story about him than of writing about my own nose. It was all too painfully familiar. It was just to escape from him and his kind that I wrote at all. Grosvenor was killed in 1918 in Cantigny, France. Cather learned of his death while reading the newspaper in a hair salon.
